It's taking me a little longer than usual to hit 20 ratings, but I've had enough time and feedback to reflect on how things went with Harvest Timing.

Preparation

In the lead up to the last few Ludum Dare weekends, I've tried to jot down at least one idea for each theme from the final round of voting, and to do get a basic Godot template ready. I've got two kids under 3 and only work on my games while they're sleeping, so I have to make every minute count! :laughing:

I didn't do any preparation for this event, which I really regret. I hadn't planned to enter at all, and decided to join at the last minute when I saw that the theme was "Harvest". My wife is a huge fan of Harvest Moon, and I figured this would be a good opportunity to try and get a basic farm-sim engine up and running.

Modularity == Reuse

Six months ago I built a Godot plugin for input prompts, mainly so that I could learn how Godot's plugin system works. At the time, I thought the plugin was pretty cool: ActionPrompt nodes are associated with an action from the Input Map, automatically show the right key or gamepad button, and fire a signal when the right input is detected.

This was the first game I've built using those nodes, and now I think the plugin is really cool :sunglasses:. It took me about 5 minutes to build the game's Control screen:

My experience has convinced me to start converting more of the systems I use regularly into modular plugins, rather than trying to cram everything into one (bloated) template.

I imagine I'll be working on breaking out my Player and StateMachine code, next; I wasted about an hour trying to get the tile-based movement to work the way I wanted, and I'm still not entirely happy with it.

Humor

I normally aim to score high in "Humor", but I don't think I left myself enough room. I managed to fit in some truly terrible puns, but only left myself room for 2-3 word jokes. In hindsight, I should have provided some more opportunities around the farm to interact with objects, rather than populating it solely with objects tied to the game mechanics.

Difficulty and Play-testing

I knew if I just made a Harvest Moon clone I'd score poorly, so I thought I'd ramp up the difficulty a little bit by making the plants hard to care for. This is a mechanic I experimented with before in a previous Ludum Dare, but I hoped I could do it better this time. I'm not sure if I succeeded :sweat_smile:

I'm proud of the fact that each plant has its own watering schedule, and I think the idea has legs. People have played for a lot longer than I expected, suggesting that requiring some thought be put into caring for the plants is keeping people engaged.

But I clearly didn't spend long enough on the instructions, or thinking through how confusing certain number sequences could be. There's not enough feedback to the player, and the only way to learn the rules of the game is through trial and error. In short, I made the game far too hard. I asked my wife to play-test things right before submission to make sure there weren't any game-breaking bugs, but I should have asked for some earlier feedback on whether the number sequences made any sense. Lesson learnt. :pensive:

Thanks for reading, and thanks to everybody who has already taken the time to rate and leave feedback. Back to rating!